Control Language

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The Control Language (CL) is a scripting language originally created by IBM for the System/38 Control Program Facility^[1] and later used in OS/400 (now known as IBM i). It bears a resemblance to the IBM Job Control Language and consists of a set of command objects (*CMD) used to invoke traditional programs or get help on what those programs do. CL can also be used to create CL programs (congruent to shell scripts) where there are additional commands that provide program-like functionality (IF/ELSE, variable declaration, file input, etc.)

Although CL is a scripting language for system administration, it is used mainly to create compiled programs. The use of interpreted CL scripts through the SBMDBJOB command ^[2] is in fact extremely limited.

While thousands of commands were written by IBM developers to perform system level tasks like compiling programs, backing up data, changing system configurations, displaying system object details, or deleting them, commands are not limited to systems level concerns and can be drafted for user applications as well.